


Take all the children where flood water's low

by uumuu



Series: Fëanorians in Beleriand [9]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Original Character-centric, Second Kinslaying | Sack of Doriath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 12:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14568690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: There were lucky children and less lucky children. Estelindë considered herself one of the lucky ones.





	Take all the children where flood water's low

The Iathrim stopped dead in their tracks as enemies broke into that last safe quarter of Menegroth much sooner than they had expected. Fear immediately gave way to surprise. A group of Fëanorians stood in their way, but they could hardly be called soldiers. All were very young. Some might be just past their majority, some looked to be barely old enough to hold a sword, and had clearly no experience doing it. 

“It is fitting, that the Sons of Fëanorians would send children after children,” Nimloth said, once she had recovered from the shock, her tone hiding her fear but not her hatred.

“Our parents aren't here to protect us, Lady,” Estelindë, the tallest of the group and its leader, spat back. “They all died fighting Morgoth, unlike your people.” 

“Is that the Silmaril?” cried a small, hopeful voice.

“Our salvation,” echoed more hopeful voices. 

For a few moments all eyes were drawn to the jewel, shining on the Nauglamir, clutched in Elwing's hands.

Nimloth turned towards her daughter too, and the man who carried the child wrapped her tight in the heavy blanket draped around her shoulders, so that the jewel's radiance was hidden. Its lure persisted.

“Let us through and no harm will be done to you.” 

“You give us the Silmaril and we will let you go.”

“Out of our way, destroyers of our home!”

“We gave you a chance to avoid this.”

Neither side gave way. 

The battle was short-lived. The Iathrim who had gathered around their Queen were many, fleeing the invaders with their children and their most treasured possessions, and they were stronger in body. Estelindë managed to trap Nimloth, however, engaging her in a long duel.

Nimloth kept a cool head at first, but her experience of actual combat was limited, and the longer the duel dragged on, the longer Estelindë evaded her attacks, the more she worried. Her children were getting away without her, and on the other end of the hallway two surviving Fëanorians were mercilessly killing the nurses who had looked after her sons, who were all unarmed, and made for easy targets.

Estelindë had battled too many orcs to give in to impatience. She gauged Nimloth's nervousness well, and had an easy time of goading her into an attack that unbalanced her. She quickly stepped behind Nimloth and stabbed her in the back with the dagger she wielded in her left hand, a short but deadly blade that had served her well in the narrow passageways of Menegroth. Nimloth stood frozen for a moment, the crashed to the ground on her back. Estelindë pierced her chest too.

Nimloth made a gurgling sound as the blade was pulled out, but her lips opened in a triumphant smile. “My children...safe,” she rasped out, blood trickling out of her mouth.

“I wonder how far your daughter will get. As for your sons...” Estelindë trailed off and pointed to the farthest corner of the hallway.

Eluréd and Elurín cowered there, hugging each other. The two Fëanorian soldiers stood next to them, among the corpses of their nurses, their sword-spears pointed at the twins.

Nimloth's eyes widened. She started coughing, her body convulsing in a futile attempt to stand up.

Estelindë ignored her. Amras was striding into the room, with his followers in tow, his face unreadable as ever. He stepped over the few dead Iathrim and crouched next to the fallen Fëanorians, found two that were still breathing and entrusted them to his men to be taken to the healers who waited outside of Menegroth.

Behind him came Curufin's wife. Her face was drawn, her eyes wild, and her step faltered. Estelindë held her breath: Curufin had to be dead. There could be no other reason why his wife would look so beside herself. And yet the very thought that Curufin might be dead seemed so absurd. Of course she was aware that it could happen, but Curufin and his brothers had been fighting for so long...

“D – Díor's daughter has the Silmaril, they are taking her away, they headed west,” she forced herself to say.

“A secret passage is there, according to what the Dwarves told us,” Amras confirmed.

Curufin's wife didn't look him in the eye. “I will give pursuit,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Estelindë followed her with her gaze until she disappeared through the archway, her silhouette drowned in the thundering footsteps behind her. 

For the first time, a hollow feeling gripped her, a hollow feeling that had to be a sense of loss.

She had a very blurry recollection of her parents, too vague and buried under too many other faces. Her first clear memory was of the man who whisked her away from the wreckage of a burning village on the plains of Thargelion, before orcs could get to her. She remembered another burning village, and the corpse of a boy not much older than she had been at the time, but much, much less lucky: a pair of eyes bulging red and white in a head attached to a mangled shape that wasn't a body any longer. She had given him a name and committed it to memory along with the names and faces of all the people she had known in her short life – comrades, friends who spent too little time with her to become family, but who deserved to be remembered even if she couldn't afford to miss them all. And then there were her lords. Her lords who had done all they could to destroy the cause of all their woes. Her lords who had only one another left and the ever-fainter hope of getting their treasure back. Her lords had been there before her, and should be there after she met her end like everybody else.

She came back to her surroundings when Amras put his hand on her shoulder. Even now that she was an adult his hand was twice as big as hers, and even without the armour he had worn until the Nirnaeth he was large, and loomed over her. In her mind, she had always likened him to an autumn tree, brought to life by fury and icy disdain for the world. She would have been frightened of him, even now, if his cold mismatched eyes didn't look at her with approval. He had been the one to teach her how to fight, when her arms became strong enough to lift a spear strong enough to fend off orcs: the closest thing to a home.

“You did well,” he told her. “You always were my best pupil, and have proven yourself by slaying the queen of Doriath.”

Estelindë bowed her head. She bit her lip. How could she even ask him if his brother was dead?

Durithil, one of the other two survivors, had no such qualms. “Is your brother dead, my Lord?” he shouted, clutching the sword-spear that he had inherited from his mother, which did nothing to hide his trembling. “If he is, Díor's sons deserve to die too!” 

Amras's nostrils fluttered, and his jaw clenched. 

It was all the answer Estelindë needed. She stared unseeing down at Nimloth, who was wheezing very rapidly and very faintly now, with her eyes glazed over and filled with the ruin of her family.

“Perhaps,” Amras said, almost to himself. “Perhaps.”

**Author's Note:**

> I think the “fact” that Elves didn't have children in wartime might be true (to an extent) only for kingdoms which were relatively safe. People who had armies on the front lines had to be painfully aware of the fact that if they didn't have children and kept dying, their numbers would very rapidly dwindle while orcs kept coming. Hence I believe there had to be a considerable number of children and young people in the Fëanorian kingdoms at the time of the Dagor Bragollach, and a few would have been born after that, too. (I still believe that new recruits in the Fëanorians' army were mostly locals, though, especially after the Nirnaeth.)
> 
> Condemning kinslaying is easy from an outside perspective, but to someone caught up in the middle of a long draining war things would not have been, or _felt_ , so clear-cut, especially after the Nirnaeth, when defeating Morgoth became obviously impossible and prospects for the future were very grim. 
> 
> Estelindë means 'hope-maker' in Quenya (her name being a small protest against the ban on Quenya), and she was born a few years before the Dagor Bragollach. There are, interestingly, exactly 51 years between the Dagor Bragollach and the attack on Doriath.
> 
> The title is from the song "Ain't no devil" by Andrea Wasse.


End file.
